Senator Rand Paul is taking his mission to cut U.S. foreign aid
to the voters this week with a series of campaign ads that target
Senate Democrats who voted against his amendment to block U.S.
aid to Pakistan, Egypt, and Libya.

The Kentucky Republican's political action committee, RAND PAC,
went up with the first two ads this week, targeting West Virginia
Senator Joe Manchin and Florida Senator Bill Nelson, two Democrats facing re-election
challenges this November.

A Paul political operative told Business Insider Tuesday that another ad
is planned to go up against Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio by Thursday, and one will
likely go up against Claire McCaskill in Missouri sometime
next week.

According to the Paul operative, these states were chosen because
the Republican challengers — businessman John Raese in West
Virginia, Florida Rep. Connie Mack, Ohio State Treasurer Josh
Mandel, and Missouri Congressman Todd Akin — support Paul's
stance on foreign aid. More broadly, he said, the ads are an
attempt to "change some hearts and minds" on the issue of foreign
aid.

Regardless of the intent, the ad blitz is an aggressive move by
Paul, a first-term Senator who is just starting to exercise his
endorsement muscle. While it is not unusual for elected officials
to support candidates through their leadership PACs, it is rare
for a sitting Senator to level such harsh attacks against his
colleagues.

The ads themselves are pretty brutal, juxtaposing the votes
against Paul's amendment with images of the recent attacks on
U.S. diplomatic compounds in Libya and Egypt.

"Joe Manchin works with Barack Obama to send billions of our
taxpayer dollars to countries where radicals storm our embassies,
burn our flag, and kill our diplomats," the narrator says in the
West Virginia ad. "It's time to bring our taxpayer dollars home.
It's time to send Joe Manchin home too."

Manchin's response to the ad has been swift and aggressive. His
campaign team organized a press call featuring South Carolina
Republican Lindsay Graham, the ranking member of the Senate
Appropriations Subcommittee on the Department of State and
Foreign Operations and one of the fiercest critics of Paul's
amendment to block aid.

Paul's amendment, Graham said, "would have put the terrorists and
the radicals on steroids," explaining that cutting off aid to
Libya would have deprived the country of much-needed aid because
of the actions of a "few radicals." In Egypt, he added, cutting
off aid would have broken the Camp David Accords and "would
have been the worst thing we could have done for the state of
Israel."

Reacting to Graham's comments, the Paul political operative
accused the South Carolina Senator of mischaracterizing the
amendment and trying to "scare people" by saying that it would
cut off aid to Israel.

"Senator Paul neither wrote the law that way, nor intends to
apply it in that way," the source told Business Insider. "It
applies to those three countries only. Any attempt to tie it to
other aid is being done to scare people."

"Clearly there is a problem in these countries," he added. "Most
people agree that we should be examining the problems, and it
doesn't seem like anybody has really done that."